<blockquote>my great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect.”<sup>1</sup></blockquote>DH Lawrence celebrates the pleasures and urges of the body in his controversial work <em>Lady Chatterley’s Lover</em> (1928). When Connie Reid (Lady Chatterley) first meets Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper, he frightens her, unexpectedly engaging with her primal instincts: “he seemed to emerge with such a swift menace… like a sudden rush of threat out of nowhere.”<sup>2</sup> The encounter develops into a relationship, one which makes Connie feel “she was her sensual self, naked and unashamed”<sup>3</sup>. In an episode brimming with sensuality, Connie runs naked into the rain ahead of Mellors, and they make passionate love on a secluded path.<br><br>Lawrence contrasts the pleasures of the flesh with the portrayal of Connie’s husband, Clifford Chatterley, Lord of Wragby. He is a writer, fascinated by Proust and Nero. Paralysed from the waist down, he is unable to fulfil her physically, or indeed emotionally. Through his involvement with Tevershall Colliery, he is associated not only with the intellect, but industrialisation and modernisation, which Lawrence held in contempt. <br><br>By juxtaposing the body and mind through contrasting representations of Mellors and Lord Chatterley, Lawrence pays homage to his “great religion”. It is clear which he believes to be the superior: Connie lived with Clifford “in their ideas and his books”<sup>4</sup>, but her fulfilment lies only at the hands of a man who claims they should be together “really! heart an’ belly an’ cock—”<sup>5</sup>.<br><br>